


By the Rivers of Babylon

by verdant_fire



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Declarations Of Love, Exile, First Kiss, Johnlock Roulette, Longing, M/M, POV Sherlock Holmes, Pining, Pining Sherlock, Post-His Last Vow, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-02
Updated: 2014-07-02
Packaged: 2018-02-07 04:23:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1884993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verdant_fire/pseuds/verdant_fire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock goes back to Serbia, and endures exile, boredom/torture, and a certain chemical defect, for the sake of one person and three improbable words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	By the Rivers of Babylon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [2impostors](https://archiveofourown.org/users/2impostors/gifts).



> Title from [Psalm 137](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%20137) and beta by [GoldenUsagi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenUsagi/pseuds/GoldenUsagi), with my thanks. Any remaining foibles are my own. :)

Sherlock goes back to Serbia.

He cranes his neck to watch John disappear through the aeroplane window. The sun glints bronze off his hair until it’s eclipsed by glare from the car, the planes, the buildings of London.

It’s too bright.

Sherlock closes his eyes.

//

He didn’t say it on the tarmac.

He’s never said it, not properly, not to anyone.

He couldn’t say it then, but he lives it every day.

He could say it now, but he knows that John will never hear it.

//

He can't remember exactly when it started, which is frankly appalling. His memory is all but eidetic, but for a very long time, he didn't even realise it was happening. He remembers meeting John, of course, but even after that, when their lives clicked together like the tumblers of a lock, he had no inkling of what was coming. He just wanted _more_ , and that sensation was familiar enough, even if it wasn't usually provoked by a person. But it gradually sublimated into something much odder and deeper and stronger, something for which he had no prior frame of reference. So he can hardly be blamed, really, if he didn't recognise it for what it was until it was far, far too late.

He finally realises it at the wedding, and feels it after in a way not even the drugs can erase. Chemical defect, human error, sentiment: the last great fall to which he thought he was immune. But he has eliminated the impossible, so what remains must be the truth. He is a scientist, and however terrifying the conclusion, he cannot bring himself to twist the data to his own ends. So: he is in love with John.

Sherlock Holmes is in love with John Watson.

It's worse than the cocaine. Synthetic opiates are a pale shadow of it, can't hold a candle to the intensity of its nuclear immolation. All those years of wanton self-destruction, and in the end, it will be selflessness that kills him.

It's terrible.

It's wonderful.

//

It's mostly waiting at first—long days and nights of surveillance and planning that only occasionally culminate in the field work he hates. It's a wonder the entirety of MI6 didn't expire of boredom decades ago. Sherlock doesn't even need to be present for most of it. But the agents insist and he has nowhere better to be at the moment, so he tunes out their incessant droning and lets his mind go where he can't: home.

John is there, as he’d been three weeks before the first time Sherlock left, reading the newspaper in the other room while Sherlock finished his experiment. When he glanced up from the microscope, the early morning sun had warmed John's hair and made it glow golden as Midas’ touch. It crowned John and made him a little king on an upholstered throne. He found himself looking up more often to track the movement of the light across John's scalp. He wondered (out of idle curiosity) what it would feel like to follow the path of the light with his fingertips, to learn the topography of John's skull and the texture of his hair between Sherlock's fingers. Would John let him? Would he giggle and dismiss it as 'Sherlock being Sherlock', or become annoyed and push him away? John could be unpredictable in these matters, so new data was always useful.

Ultimately, Sherlock's experiment was ruined by neglect. He had to start it over the next morning, and he didn't even mind.

//

He sheds his suit, his coat, his armour, again. He left his coat with Mycroft, exchanged it for nondescript T-shirts and hoodies that make him look like a misguided tourist. The ill-fitting fabric sloughs off of him like a skin every time he changes his identity. He doesn’t feel like himself without his suits, without John, but he’s not meant to.

It never gets easier, but it does become routine.

No one would have expected him to be so good at disappearing, but he's had a lot of practice this year.

//

He’s been a dead man walking once before, but this time, he knows he won’t be walking for much longer.

It’s surprisingly okay.

John is safe. John is happy. John has what he wants.

Sherlock never expected to make it past thirty anyway.

//

It's fanciful, but sometimes he thinks that when they put him on a morgue slab, all of the places on his body that John has ever touched or nudged or brushed against in the hallway will fluoresce under the black light and illuminate him like the scene of a crime, with the thin skin over his heart glowing brightest of all. 

The autopsy report will say ‘Cause of Death: John Watson’, and Sherlock cannot think of a better way to go.

//

The landscape here is sometimes quite pleasing, when he leaves his mind long enough to notice it. At night, the stars are viciously beautiful, and the sight of them makes him ache fiercely for John every time.

He looks at the stars and thinks about decaying orbits and how, if John is a black hole, Sherlock passed his event horizon long ago.

//

At the lab in Barts, he'd looked up from his microscope slide and thought, _Oh, you're interesting_ , and looking back, he knows that was the beginning of the end.

At the pool, he'd wanted—needed—to confirm with his hands that John wasn't hurt. He needed the proof of as many senses as possible that John was fine, needed to map and survey the terrain of him with his palms. Instead, he’d ripped the Semtex off John’s back and prepared himself to die, the first time.

At the graveyard, he’d stood chill and quiet as the marble slabs around him and watched John say goodbye, his face a slow-motion demolition before Sherlock’s eyes. John had limped away, and Sherlock had gone the opposite direction, to protect John rather than release him from his grief.

At the wedding, he’d learned how it felt to watch John leave him behind. He knew they’d never go back to the way things had been, and he realised that that existence, with John, was actually all he wanted out of life, but his own actions had erased it forever.

Everything happened just that little bit too late.

//

He’d said, truthfully, that John was a romantic, but perhaps it rubbed off. He still catches himself thinking _maybe_ , and _perhaps_ , and _if I can just_. The blasted hope won’t go away, small but stubborn, like John. He can feel it buried deep in his mind palace and struggling to get out. He can’t bring himself to kill it entirely. It’s all one with pirates and starlight and the possibility of the open sea.

It’s adventure, and epic poetry, and the holy despair of loving someone who will never love you back.

//

When he dreams, he often ends up back on the tarmac with John. He says the words at last, and John says them back, and clings on to him as if he'll never leave, never let him go.

Sometimes, John is under him, pupils blown dark and deep as mine shafts, and Sherlock presses the pads of his fingers into all the right places until John opens up like a puzzle box for him.

Once, John is blogging and tells him, blithely, “I'm making a list of all the times you've ever done something that made me love you, versus all the times you've been an utter prick, and we'll see which side wins. If you’re good enough, maybe I won’t leave you.” So Sherlock waits with his heart in his throat to see which column ends up the longest, but he wakes up just before he can find out.

Sherlock doesn't sleep much.

//

He tries not to wonder what dying will be like, but he has too much time on his hands, so he wonders anyway. Will it be long and painful and drawn-out? Or will he not even see it coming, with no time for even the most echoing and exiled of goodbyes? Sherlock has never believed in an afterlife, or in God for that matter, but for the first time, he can at least understand why people delude themselves. 

It would be so good to see John again.

//

There's a receipt in his coat pocket, from the last time they'd got Chinese. John had paid, because he'd missed Sherlock's birthday two weeks earlier and that had made him feel guilty enough to swipe the receipt from the waiter and pay over Sherlock's protests. After they left, Sherlock had stolen it back when John wasn't looking.

He keeps it with him in the pocket of whatever clothes he's wearing and touches it like a talisman. It grounds him, even if he doesn't entirely know why.

Well. He does know, but he tries not to dwell on it.

//

He makes it three and a half months before he’s captured again. That’s three months longer than anyone else has managed, but still hardly satisfactory.

In his head, John is there with him, giving advice, stopping him when he's tempted to say too much. He knows it's not real, and that's how he knows he's still sane.

Some days he almost wishes he weren't. In this place, it’s a disadvantage more often than not.

Every time they strike him, something inside him vibrates at the exact frequency of John’s voice saying, _You’re my best friend._

//

Two days later, there’s a commotion outside his cell, culminating in the thud of a body against the door and the rusty creak of hinges as it opens to admit a black-clad figure.

“You’re needed at home,” says Anthea, and lowers her hood. Her mouth purses in a faint moue of distaste at the state of his person.

“Was Mycroft too busy?” he sneers.

“You know how he feels about legwork,” she chides him, and shoots the next guard who comes through the door.

//

When he gets back to England, he’s taken to one of Mycroft’s underground lairs again. Mycroft is waiting there for him, looking insufferably pleased about something. He attempts to hand Sherlock the surveillance file on John, but Sherlock lets it drop onto the desk.

“I’ll find out for myself this time.”

"Good luck, Sherlock."

Sherlock glares. "Luck is for the small-minded."

Mycroft's mouth quirks into the beginning of a smile. "Even so."

//

Four months, six days, and seven hours after he left, Sherlock knocks on the door of the Watson house.

John answers the door. His eyes, wide with shock, meet Sherlock’s, and he suddenly finds it very difficult to breathe properly. There is no colour or beauty in the world except for the depthless cobalt of John's eyes, and the way his lashes disappear in direct sunlight, and the gilded afternoon light that perches on his shoulders like epaulets.

Sherlock cannot speak.

He never thought he’d be in the same place as John again, and now he’s only a metre away. Their shared breaths fill the space between them and connect them, bear them up on the same current. If he listens very hard, he can hear the air rushing out of John’s lungs and into his own, rapid and subliminal as the River Fleet. Sherlock fills his lungs as deeply as he can. The faint scent of John drapes itself over his hindbrain with the same weight of comfort and familiarity as his Belstaff, and he can feel the ragged edge of his anxiety start to recede.

It helps him remember to breathe, at least.

“Sherlock.” John is staring at him, blank and unreadable. “I thought … um. Jesus.” He blinks, and moves to the side of the doorframe. "You can come in, you know."

Sherlock comes in.

Mary's gone, about three weeks ago judging from the state of the sitting room. There's no sign of an infant, but— _oh_. In retrospect, Sherlock's defensive tactics against Mary's ex seem more sensible than ever, if a bit too late.

John is still staring at him.

He should probably say something.

"John, I—you should know that I—thought about you. While I was away. I … missed you." Not the three words he wanted to say, but it's a start.

John exhales forcefully, as if Sherlock has punched him in the stomach. "I missed you too, Sherlock," he says, voice low, but he won't meet Sherlock's eyes.

“John …” He stops. John clears his throat, and finally looks up.

Sherlock smiles. “Dinner?”

//

They go to Angelo’s, where the proprietor treats Sherlock’s return like the fabled Second Coming and showers their table with so much wine and so many candles that Sherlock is seriously contemplating one more assassination, until he sees John grinning at the expression on his face and trying not to laugh. So that’s all right then.

Sherlock feels an answering buoyancy in his own chest at John’s smothered laughter. It makes him light-headed and dizzy. He feels drunk, but he’s only had half a glass of wine.

“Eat, Sherlock,” John exhorts, like he used to, and pushes the basket of bread at him. “You look like a skeleton.”

So Sherlock picks at his food, dodges most of John’s questions, and watches him grow progressively less tense while talking about nothing in particular. All the while, Sherlock cannot believe his own luck. By rights, he should be dead many times over, but instead, he’s here. Maybe he really is invincible. Maybe John makes him invincible.

John breaks off in the middle of a discourse—on something, Sherlock’s not sure what, because he was distracted by counting John’s new grey hairs and wondering if their texture or tensile strength is different to that of the brassier strands, and is John at all likely to let him find out—to murmur a statement. Sherlock startles, caught.

“Sorry, what?”

John squares his shoulders, a soldier ready to advance. He smiles, but it’s a sad smile. “I said, I wish I could have been with you. I … wanted to be with you.”

“You were,” Sherlock blurts out, “you were with me all the time. I mean—”

“I know what you mean, Sherlock,” John whispers. The reverent, raw tone of his voice cracks Sherlock open like the sky after a lightning strike. John cannot possibly mean what Sherlock hopes, can he? Surely he just means the same camaraderie he’s always meant. Probably it’s that. Sherlock needs to touch him, though, just a bit, just to be sure. He can feel the static electricity gathering in his fingertips, looking for a way to complete the circuit. He is a live wire, and John is ground.

Instead, he sits on his hands and lets Angelo bring them dessert.

//

After, they stand at the kerb in silence. Sherlock can sense John looking at him while he searches for and hails a cab. When he looks back at John, the other man stands a little straighter.

“Come over for tea,” Sherlock ventures, and tries to make it sound less pleading than he feels.

John gives him a ghost of his old smile. “Yeah, all right.”

//

When they get back to Baker Street, Sherlock lets John go up first, so he can watch the seventeen steps welcome John back and lift him up to the landing, like hands raised in gratitude. It’s surreal, the way the scant light in the entryway gathers itself to John. But then, he belongs here. He should never cross another threshold but this one, never hang his coat anywhere else.

When John stretches to hang his coat on the peg, the cuffs of his jumper recede slightly, and Sherlock can see the pale tributaries of veins in his wrists, streaming blood back to the headwaters of John’s heart, where Sherlock wants to be. He is awed, suddenly, to be living in a universe that produced John Watson. Millions of years of human evolution, and trillions of possible genetic permutations at conception, all combined to form this man and no other. Statistically speaking, John is a near-impossibility, yet he exists.

“You’re miraculous,” Sherlock’s mouth says of its own volition, and John turns, bemused.

“Ta. Um, you too. Are you feeling all right?”

“I—yes.” Sherlock shakes his head vigorously, to clear it, and abruptly realises that this is one of the most terrifying moments of his life. 

Why is this occasion so different from saying the words slightly less overtly at John’s wedding? Why is this last declaration—which, after all that he’s done, should be obvious, almost an afterthought—so difficult? And why does he feel as though the words are continually growing inside him, crowding out his organs and crawling up his oesophagus, desperate to fall off the tip of his tongue?

What if he says them, and John leaves? What if he laughs, and _then_ leaves?

But what if he doesn’t?

Sherlock has had so much time to review pros and cons and likelihoods, and despite his panic, no matter how many times he ran the variables, he always concluded that the benefits outweighed the risks. John, who is good and generous and kind, will almost certainly not leave him if he can’t return Sherlock’s words. If necessary, Sherlock is still a good enough liar that he could make John believe it was a misunderstanding, that he hadn’t really meant it in _that_ way. Or, even if John wasn’t convinced, he would allow them both the excuse to pretend it never happened, and they could have whatever friendship might be left to them.

Sherlock will take whatever John is willing to give him. Thus, logic dictates that, since this is yet another chance Sherlock never expected to receive, he would be a fool not to take it.

He needs to be brave.

John makes him brave.

John is here, and John is waiting. Waiting for him to take his _second_ second chance and start living again.

Sherlock takes a deep breath, and opens his mouth.

“John, what I’m trying to say—what I wanted to say before I left—is that I … love you. John Watson. I love you.”

John’s eyes widen. They are very dark and deep and boundless, like the North Sea at twilight. Sherlock watches John’s quick breaths and the myriad emotions that flit across his wonderful, changeable face. Time dilates, stretches and lengthens, because Sherlock’s heart is travelling at light speed and he cannot slow it down; it will either burst or implode waiting for John’s response, waiting for him to say— 

“Why didn’t you—oh, hell.” John laughs, once, and scrubs his hand over his face. “Sherlock, you idiot. I love you too.”

And then—Sherlock is flying, he is falling, he is weightless, he is soaring on the wings of a euphoric high better than anything he has ever felt. His future with John stretches out like a map unrolled, like the wide universe. He can feel his eyes start to burn and his mouth pull into a grin without his permission, and John is grinning back at him, and it is _perfect_ , transcendent, singular. He had no idea a chemical defect could do this to a person; it’s really very— _oh_.

Sherlock looks down. John’s hand is on his chest. Now John is touching his face, tilting his head up so their gazes meet. John is looking at him with the kind of emotion that Sherlock had thought only existed in bad novels. John’s fingertips are stroking up the back of his neck, pressing and pulling and drawing him down towards John, and Sherlock goes willingly, will follow John anywhere, even— _oh God_.

John’s mouth is on his. It is chaste and slow and very, very gentle, as if Sherlock is something precious that John wants to keep. It is almost beyond belief, and yet.

Sherlock is still alive, and John is here and safe and kissing him. John forgave him, again. John wants him to stay. John’s breath is coming in soft little bursts against Sherlock’s cheek, and he is so very warm under Sherlock’s hands, and life is (suddenly, breathtakingly) perfect.

He’s home now.

Sherlock closes his eyes.


End file.
